In Claremont, “Legends Attic” serves as a museum, souvenir shop, and hangout.
CLAREMONT: If you’re not actively searching for it, you might miss it. Nevertheless, once you’re there, you might not want to leave—whether you’re a fan or a collector of sports memorabilia.
Legends Attic, at 619 W. Foothill Blvd., is directly adjacent to the DoubleTree hotel. It’s a veritable gold mine of sports memorabilia, including trading cards, jerseys, helmets, and bobbleheads. This could be considered sports nirvana for fans of the Dodgers or Laker teams, in particular.
Orel Hershiser, a current Dodger announcer and former Cy Young Award winner, along with his business partners Eddie Allizadeh and Mike Caposio, worked together on it. It is free to enter and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Many people think, “Oh, you’re a museum,” when they come here, according to Hershiser. You’re a gallery, I see. I saw that you sell baseball cards. Oh, you have shirts and gear from the game. I saw that you own pinball machines. I saw that you own a video arcade. You have celebrity stuff and Dodger stuff, man.
“The most common inquiry we receive online is, ‘What is the admission fee?'” Furthermore, Allizadeh said. “And after that, people assume that everything here is a museum. Are you selling anything, some people ask?
And while we usually list everything as for sale, we actually want it to seem like a museum because it’s really essential to me to preserve the Orel Hershiser brand of DNA. Additionally, if we open one
Consider the space adorned with artwork featuring the Dodgers. Most of it comes from Laguna Beach-based Dave Hobrecht, who also does his own Hobrecht Sports Art gallery. Hobrecht has done a number of creative pieces for this gallery, including the All-Time Dodgers Art Book, which he produced with former Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti and sells there.
One of the black-and-white prints shows a montage of the scenes surrounding the night in San Diego in 1988 when Hershiser beat Don Drysdale’s record for the most consecutive scoreless innings. The image does not exactly replicate one particular moment from that night.
Perhaps what Hershiser referred to as the “all-time spring training meeting,” a picture of a Dodger clubhouse gathering in which Hershiser, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Kirk Gibson, Fernando Valenzuela, Pee Wee Reese, Clayton Kershaw, Pedro Guerrero, Roy Campanella, Steve Garvey, and Jackie Robinson all attended the speech given by the managers Tom Lasorda and Walter Alston. Included in the cast were Vin Scully, Dr. Frank Jobe, seasoned clubhouse guy Mitch Poole, Branch Rickey, and owners Walter and Peter O’Malley. Babe Ruth, who was a coach in Brooklyn in 1938, was positioned in a corner of the space.
Additionally, there is a print of what is arguably Hobrecht’s most well-known painting, “Grace,” which shows Martin Luther King, Don Newcombe, Campanella, Robinson, and others praying before a dinner.
Hershiser decided that the original Hobrecht painting will stay in its current location at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City after purchasing it and five other paintings by the artist in April.
“It broke when it was shipped there,” Hershiser claimed. “And they planned to correct it as soon as they saw it (at the museum). “No, let’s leave the break, because that’s the strife and the pressure that these men were under when they went through this time in America,” the museum curator then declared.
